The proliferation of clouds and external service provider appears to be causing a fortuitous shift in more than a few IT organizations: they now have a clear mission to generate value from IT.
This is a sharp contrast from earlier days when the majority of IT's effort was spent the inevitable treadmill of operations, maintenance and upgrades.
And the discussions are now starting to take an interesting -- and promsing -- turn for the better.
An Obvious Mandate For Value Generation?
Look across any set of traditional organizational functions, and you'll see that each has an implied mandate for unique value generation.
For example, at EMC, engineering has to deliver killer products. Manufacturing has to build them with amazing quality and at ever-decreasing costs. Sales and marketing has to figure out how to get these products into customers' hands in a variety of ways. Customer support has to deliver a world-class experience, and so on.
Even support functions, like HR, finance and legal has to figure out how to deliver unique value. Otherwise, the tendency will always be to use an external provider. Why use your scarce internal resources for something that someone else can most likely do faster, better and cheaper?
If whatever your group is doing isn't generating unique value, maybe someone else should be doing the task.
And that's true for IT as well.
A Change In The Air For IT?
Cloud and service provider concepts are starting to work their way into more IT thinking. You don't have to do everything yourself, and -- even for the stuff you have to do internally -- you can do it more efficiently with a private cloud.
Less time on the IT treadmill. More time thinking about how to generate unique value using IT.
It's a refreshing change in perspective when you encounter it. And the discussions I have with customers who are either in this mindset (or approaching it quickly) are some of the most stimulating IT conversations I've ever had.
My first exposure to this mindset came many years ago as I started to meet the IT groups that supported financial traders. They'd kill for milliseconds or sometimes microseconds. Exotic technology? No problem.
I realized that this was because they clearly understood the relationship between better IT capability and value generation. Not a perspective that was widely shared at the time.
But, as of late, I've noticed a sharp pickup in these IT-as-value-generator discussions. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's because day-to-day stuff is better under control, I'm not quite sure.
Whatever the reason, it's definitely a vast improvement over the traditional sorts of IT-centric conversations.
As vendors, it can be a trap. Customer ask "how do I generate more value from IT?". Vendor responds "that's easy, just buy <insert name of product>". Not really what people want to hear ...
I think -- going forward -- the better vendors will be able to step a bit outside of their vendor-ness, and share real insights into how people are approaching value generation from IT.
And I, for one, want to be one those better vendors :)
How Do You Focus The Value Generation Discussion?
Having done this now more than a few times, I've developed a pattern to help stimulate the value generation discussion. I've found it's really more about a mindset than specific technologies.
One part is on the "what", e.g. what are some candidate focus areas to go explore? And, once we have a few of those in hand, I try and foster some discussion on the "how". Doing IT for sustained value generation appears to be subtly different than classical project-oriented IT.
This -- at it's essence -- is a business discussion. Although there are similar patterns within a vertical, there are enough differences between organizations that you can't assume too much.
Key Roles As Value-Generation Targets
One starting point I use is to simply ask -- who are your most important, value-generating workers? If you had to guess, what would be the top 5 value-generating roles in your business?
At EMC, that list would probably include engineering, customer support, pre-sales, sales and a player to be named later :)
Here's the underlying premise: use IT to increase the productivity and effectiveness of the people who generate the most value in the organization. And that's not always the group that's complaining the loudest, or has the most budget :)
This particular discussion can lead you to all sorts of productivity-enhancing topics: native applications on mobile tablets, self-service IT functions, on-demand analytics, collaboration and workflow, enterprise search, app stores -- and a whole lot more.
There's no pre-fab answer here, but once you start digging in to what these people really want and need, there's no shortage of potential value-generating IT initiatives. A caveat: productivity enhancing ROIs can be very squishy, although back-of-the-napkin guestimates can be quite compelling.
Key Relationships As Value-Generation Targets
Just about every organization has key customers or constituents, as well as an ecosystem that surrounds it. This leads to two somewhat related discussions.
First, what can IT innovate to help your organization get closer to its existing customers and partners? And -- second -- what can IT innovate to help your organization get closer to *new* customers and partners? You'd be surprised, for example, on just how many companies have to move beyond B2B to a B2C (or perhaps a B2B2C) model.
This triggers a whole discussion around CRM, analytics, 360-degree customer views, mobile apps, social business and probably a raft of other potential topics as well. All fun stuff.
Information Assets As Value-Generation Targets
Many businesses amass huge amounts of fascinating information as part of their ongoing business operations. Usually, it's just a by-product of traditional business processes, but -- reassembled, repositioned and juxtaposed with other information sources -- this data often can be an amazing source of new business value.
Health insurance companies that have repositories of patient histories, treatments and outcomes. Financial services companies that have intimate knowledge of spending -- and payment -- demographics. Even mundane companies like EMC have intimate knowledge of who's buying what kinds of technologies -- and how they perform in the field.
Maybe you're lucky enough to be setting on potential treasure trove, maybe not, but it's worth a look -- especially if you've got an interest in IT value generation. I always ask the question -- maybe you should too?
The "How" Is Turning Out To Be Different
When I meet an individual or group that's focused on IT value generation, I've noticed that they're not really like the bread-and-butter IT type. They think and act quite differently.
First, they're experts on the business. You can listen to them talk for quite a while without a tech buzzword coming out of their mouths. They really know what their business is today, what it's trying to be, and what needs to happen along the way.
Second, they're willing to invest in innovation. Gather some resources, try something out, learn from it, and decide what to do next. And do it quickly, please.
This contrasts sharply with the traditional IT big-project approach: formal requirements gathering, assemble the business case, etc. etc. Call it "fast fail", call it a lab, call it whatever -- it's about speed and agility vs. building the pyramids.
Third, they're willing to invest in generic capabilities vs. specific projects. They might not be 100% sure how something is going to be eventually used, but that doesn't matter, since they're pretty sure whatever they're doing is likely going to be useful at some point.
Fourth, they are usually willing to aggressively partner. They look far and wide inside and outside the organization for people and organizations who can bring something unique and interesting to the table. It's not the usual customer vs. vendor discussion.
The Road Ahead
My belief is that we -- as an IT industry -- will be rather consumed with this whole cloud thing for the next few years, and then we'll move on. It needs to happen, and -- thankfully -- it's all moving in the right direction.
Whether your cloud is private, public or a hybrid combination, there will likely be a large and meaningful "cloud dividend" that can be re-invested in the business. It will likely be a combination of more time and resources that can now be pointed at IT value generation, coupled with an agile set of services that can be quickly composed to deliver new capabilities.
We'll likely be investing a lot less time and effort in building and delivering IT services -- and investing a whole lot more time trying to figure out how to create new value from what's now readily at hand.
Personally, I find the whole topic of IT value generation fascinating -- perhaps for no other reason that it gives all of us something deeply meaningful to aspire towards.
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